CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

10 ‘… and that (it is) from here (that) you seek the gifts both of the Muses and of Venus’: Catullus
describes his friend’s request through an elegantly allusive phrase. The circumlocution and the reference to
the goddesses elevate the tone of the passage, but do not make it easy to understand for the general reader.
What has Manlius asked Catullus for? The matter is controversial. There are those who take munera et
Musarum et Veneris to refer to one single entity, that is, love poetry. Meanwhile, others distinguish the
munera Musarum from the munera Veneris. In this case munera Musarum must evidently refer to some sort
of poetry; munera Veneris could refer to a girlfriend or a prostitute, to sex with Catullus, or even to love
poetry.
Proponents of the first view sometimes treat munera et Musarum et Veneris as a sort of a hendiadys (thus
most recently Trappes-Lomax 2007: 230). In ♥ν δι δυο⇑ν means ‘one through two’, and the hendiadys is
variously defined as a “figure of speech in which a single complex idea is expressed by two words connected
by a conjunction” (OLD), “putting two substantives connected by a copulative conjunction, instead of one
substantive and an adjective or attributive genitive” (Gildersleeve-Lodge 436) and a “coordinative
accumulation replacing a subordinative one” 188 (Lausberg 1960: 340). Some unambiguous examples are Cic.
Ver. 2.5.36 ad memoriam posteritatemque (i.e. ‘to the memory of prosperity’) and Verg. Geo. 2.192 pateris
et auro (i.e. ‘with cups of gold’, ‘with golden cups’). In these cases we are dealing with two substantives that
are grammatically juxtaposed even though they form a unified concept, for which one would expect “one
substantive and an adjective or attributive genitive” (Gildersleeve-Lodge, loc. cit.). That is not the case here,
so it is best to drop the term ‘hendiadys’. What is at stake here is whether munera et Musarum et Veneris
refer to two groups of gifts, one coming from the Muses and the other from Venus, or to one single group of
gifts originating from the Muses and Venus. The question is whether or not two nouns in the genitive
depending on a plural noun and linked to one another by et … et … split the group of items described by the
plural noun into two sub-groups. There are some parallels (cfr. TLL 5.2.55-57):
• Cic. Ver. 2.1.60 et istius et patris eius accepi tabulas omnis … patris quoad uixit, tuas, quoad ais te
confecisse. ‘I have received all the account-books both of this individual and of his father …, those of
his father for as long as he lived, those of you for as long as you claim to have kept them.’ All the
account-books of either person, one set for each.
• Cic. Clu. 192 quantos et uirorum et mulierum gemitus esse factos ‘How many groans both of men
and of women there had been’ - that is, groans by men and groans by women.
• Cic. Rab. Perd. 30 et C. Mari et ceterorum uirorum … mentis (an accusative plural). ‘The minds
both of Gaius Marius and of other men’: one of each.
Here the two genitives always sub-divide the plural on which they depend into smaller groups, or into
individual items. This would seem to confirm the suspicion raised by Schöll (1880: 472, accepted by
Thomson as correct) that et ... et ... is strongly disjunctive, that it sets off against each other the items that it
188 „Eine koordinierende Häufung anstelle einer subordinierenden Häufung“.
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